WaterWired

A Thanksgiving Message and Modest Proposal

Happy Thanksgiving from WaterWired!

I have many things for which to be thankful. I have been blessed with a wonderful spouse, Mary Frances, and an easy life. I make a good living doing something I love, surrounded by bright, engaged students and extraordinary colleagues. I don't have to worry about some bozo tinhorn dictator running my country. And I have some remarkable friends and an amazing older sister, not to mention my niece.

And thanks to WaterWired readers! This is post #1500. Good Lord!

Two of things for which I am thankful are clean, safe drinking water from my tap and excellent wastewater treatment (thanks to the City of Corvallis). It's a gift most of us take for granted and many in the world can only dream about.

As you enjoy Thanksgiving dinner, think about clean water and sanitation and consider this message from John Oldfield at Water Advocates; your help is needed to ensure that more obtain this gift.

Dear friends of safe drinking water and sanitation,

 

During this time of year when we have so much to be thankful for, we ask for ten minutes of your time over the next few days to encourage the US Congress to support the Water for the World Act. This legislation which has already passed the Senate by unanimous consent will help those without safe drinking water and sanitation around the developing world.

 

Now, during the lame duck session, is the most important time to contact your member of the House of Representatives to ask him or her to pass the Water for the World Act.

 

This lifesaving legislation would go a long way toward ending the diseases caused by the lack of access to safe drinking water and sanitation which constitute the world's largest public health crisis. It would also give the United States an important leadership role in providing access to water, sanitation and hygiene for millions of the world's poorest people.

 

The ask is simple: customize the draft letter below with your personal story about how water is important to you and/or your organization, put the letter on your letterhead, and fax it to as many members of Congress as possible. *** For those of you in Arkansas, California, Indiana, Maryland, Nebraska, New Jersey, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington (state), please contact John Oldfield at [email protected] for additional details. ***

 

All House offices can be contacted through 202-225-3121, or through www.house.gov. We have found that faxing your letter to the office in Washington, DC is most effective at getting the message through.

 

For further information on the Water for the World Act please visit:

• Water Advocates Press Release on Senate Passage of the Water for the World Act
• PDF of the Water For the World Act
• Educational video about the Water for the World Act

Thank you all for your assistance with this important piece of legislation. The draft letter that we are asking you to customize and fax to Congress is below.

 

Best wishes from everyone at Water Advocates for a Happy Thanksgiving! :)

__

Here's the sample letter: 

Dear [House Member]:

 

[insert quick personal intro/story about your or your organization’s interest/activity in safe drinking water and sanitation in developing countries]

 

After extensive discussions with policymakers of both parties, the Water for the World Act was passed in the Senate by unanimous consent. The House is now considering whether to bring a streamlined version of the legislation to the Floor. In sum, the Water for the World Act will almost double the effectiveness of the Water for the Poor Act of 2005 -- in terms of lives saved and illness prevented by the availability of clean drinking water and sanitation -- with no  additional federal funds. By reformulating and modernizing the way US water aid is focused, the bill will meet the safe drinking water and sanitation needs of 50 million people over the next six years, enhance the capacity of USAID and the State Department to utilize water more effectively and sustainably in their development and diplomacy efforts, leverage an additional 25% in non-federal funds to reach more people, and ensure that our limited aid resources are directed toward  the areas of greatest need and greatest impact, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

 

House passage of the Water for the World Act will complement what I and many other US civic and faith groups, foundations, corporations, and water nonprofits are doing to respond to this vital challenge. If you agree, please contact the House Foreign Affairs Committee to express your support for this bipartisan, level-funded authorization that will enable the United States to improve the health of millions of people -- chiefly women and children -- worldwide, and to stabilize regions threatened by water shortage and disease.

 

Thank you for your attention to this important matter.

 

[personal close]

 

Sincerely,

“Thanksgiving Day comes, by statute, once a year; to the honest person it comes as frequently as the heart of gratitude will allow.” -- Edward Sandford Martin

NAWAPA's Neanderthal Nonsense

For shame! Disparaging cavemen again!

Thought I would pass along the latest blather from the LaRouche NAWAPA folks.

"As is now painfully obvious to our citizens, the recent midterm elections have done nothing to solve the crisis. For the moment, the Republican Party leadership appears only to be interested in “out- Obama- ing” Obama and the Democrats, in the brutality of their budget cuts. The unnecessary deaths of our elderly and other vulnerable citizens by the dismantling of Social Security and eliminating Medicare will not balance the budget any better than destroying our cities through allowing police and fire departments to be gutted. Nor will our crisis be solved through the sale of our nation’s vital infrastructure. We can never cut our way out of this crisis- we must build our way out."

"For those patriots whose allegiance lies to their nation first, and party second, the discussion has gone in a far different direction than how deep and severe the budget cuts should be. This discussion is centered on the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), as the platform on which we will build our way out of the physical economic collapse by leading the world again in pushing the frontiers of science and technology."

"Conceived and designed in detail by the Parsons Engineering Company in 1964(!), NAWAPA will divert a portion of Alaska and Northern Canada's annual fresh-water run-off, and bring it down to the Prairie Provinces of Canada, the arid, but potentially fertile lands of the Great American Desert, and the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts spreading into Northern Mexico. By the strategic creation of dams, reservoirs, tunnels and other elements along the natural topographical features of two-thirds of the North American land mass, NAWAPA achieves the greatest possible efficiency in water development in the continent's history, with the least amount of elements involved in its construction." [WW comments: Least amount? WTF?]

"Initial phases of building NAWAPA will not only immediately create three to four million jobs in some of the most highly skilled professions existing, but will require an integration of whole areas of our presently disintegrated physical economy, such as water, power, transportation, machine-tools, steel, etc. The “can-do” spirit of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal projects and John F. Kennedy's moon-mission will be revived in the new challenges and obstacles that NAWAPA presents to all scientific frontiers. Economist Lyndon LaRouche and collaborators have also elaborated new ways in which this project can be thought of today as we push to implement it in 2010, including the role which nuclear power can play, and NAWAPA's role as an experiment in potential continental climate engineering and terraforming, to which NASA scientists who rightly wish to see mankind on Mars in this century can look forward."

"In recent months, the conception of this economic recovery program for the continent has been refined through many conference calls, interviews with individual experts, and video studies. We are now issuing an invitation to individual patriots and representatives of institutions involved in diverse sectors such as nuclear and rail engineering, soil science, agriculture, geotechnical, hydrology, meteorology, and other related investigations, to participate in further bringing the idea of NAWAPA and its implied features into focus at various upcoming, regional conferences."

 They are also having a meeting on 4 December, noon - 5 PM. Information below.

Location:
Hilton Garden Inn (Columbia Club Room)
701 North Young Street
Kennewick, WA, 99336

Schedule:
12pm - 1pm Opening Remarks: Strategic and Scientific Importance of NAWAPA

1pm - 4:00pm Panel Discussion and Q &A with Experts on the Engineering Aspects of NAWAPA's Implementation, featuring City and Nuclear Design for Idaho's 'Sawtooth Lift', and NAWAPA's required Rail Road Development Corridors

4:00pm - 5pm Closing Remarks and Discussion: NAWAPA as U.S. Policy Shift.

Registration Required. To register, contact: (206) 250- 7398.

Unfortunately, I will be in Paris for a meeting so will have to pass on the Tri-Cities soirée. Otherwise I might have gone - seriously.

Unless I needed to wash my hair.

Here's my take on all this.

Maybe we should turn these guys loose on the Bay-Delta!

"Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." -- Samuel Johnson

Video: Whatcha Gonna Do (With All That Poo)?

No, this is not a delayed post for World Toilet Day.  

Adam Cole, a Corvallis, OR, resident who, along with friend Jenna Sullivan, had a minor viral rap video extolling the virtues of NPR, now takes on the nitrogen cycle among other things (he has a Master's degree in biology from Stanford): Whatcha Gonna Do (With All That Poo)?

 

As one wag said, Michael Pollan will love this.

 “The struggle is confused; our knight wins by no clean thrust of lance or sword, but the dragon somehow poops out, and decent democracy is victor."-- Norman Thomas

Watercrunch Reviews 7 iPhone Water Apps

Killer app. That very term seems to make people either want to regurgitate or run to their iPhone or other smart phone to download it.

So are there any water apps (killer or somnolent) for iPhones? Robert Osborne  over at Watercrunch decided to investigate, and presents his findings in a recent post. 

 You might be surprised at what's available and what Robert thought. Suffice it to say that it looks like a fertile field for  some young geeks/entrepreneurs.

So be sure to read his review, especially if you live in Dubai.

"The World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services - think apps -are less about the searching and more about the getting." -- Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff, "The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet",  Wired (from Watercrunch)

Africa Water Week, 22-26 November 2010: Will Good Things Spring Forth?

Now that my 'scraping' episode has dissipated I can get on to more substantive issues. Like... 

It's the third Africa Water Week, this year in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. 

So what is the theme? Try: Implementing the Africa Water Vision and the MDG Target: Challenges and Opportunities in Water and Sanitation. Impressive!

Here's the blurb:

The African Ministers’ Council on Water (AMCOW), in keeping with its decision to institutionalize the annual Africa Water Week (AWW), is pleased to announce that the 3rd Africa Water Week (AWW3) will be held at the United Nations Conference Centre, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from 22 to 26 of November 2010.

With only five years away from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) target date of 2015, the 3rd Africa Water Week will provide a unique occasion for taking a comprehensive stock of the challenges faced and progresses made across the continent towards achieving the goals and targets set on water and sanitation. Building on the momentum of the last Africa Water Week, held in Johannesburg, South Africa, the next Water Week will also be an opportunity to pin point and prioritize with precision the areas where Africa needs to do more and better than before in order to ensure that equitable access to water and sanitation makes a critical contribution in Africa’s progress towards sustainable development.

The African Water Week represents a political commitment at the highest level where governments, regional institutions, international partners, the private sector, the scientific community, civil society, and the media from all over the world, and in particular Africa, meet to discuss and collectively seek solutions to Africa’s water and sanitation challenges.  Accordingly, the event aims to focus attention on accelerating implementation of the actions envisaged in internationally and regionally agreed goals and targets in the areas of water and sanitation.

I learned of AWW3 a week or so ago when some of the water initiatives that consume my time sought information from people working in Africa; in one case, the State Department wanted to know.  Since I don't work in Africa I had nothing to report.

Africa seems to be big on everyone's minds these days, and for good reason: water issues seem to loom larger there, whether they be the potential impacts of climate change, WaSH, governance, corruption, or others.

And from the tell-me-something-I-don't-know-department comes this from the African Development Bank (AfDB):

The AfDB will also launch during the 3rd Africa Water week two major reports. The Water Sector Governance in Africa report finds that poor governance has been a major reason for the poor record of sustainability of water and sanitation services affecting millions of Africans.

Maybe 'corruption' too, although I suspect that is subsumed under 'poor governance'.

FYI: the second AfDB report is Guidelines for User Fees and Cost Recovery for Urban and Rural Water and Sanitation.

I suspect all the 'usual suspects' will be there, all anxious to feed at the trough of development. But I sure hope AWW3 has speakers like Tushaar Shah, whom I heard speak last June. He may not tell them what they want to hear about development. I summarized what he said on 15 June 2010 at the Toward Sustainable Groundwater in Agriculture conference:

Tushaar Shah, author of Taming the Anarchy, gave a fascinating talk about the comparison between groundwater use for irrigation in South Asia (SA; India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). He speculated that groundwater could do for SSA what it did for SA in terms of eliminating famines. He emphasized that because of economies of scale that are not present in SSA it would be better to focus on groundwater use by smallholder agriculture, which would not be a threat to the groundwater resource and catalyze the region to develop its economies. He indicated that decades of focusing on large-scale surface water irrigation projects have not done much for SSA: only 5% of its cropped land is irrigated, versus 55% in SA.

Shah suggested that treadle/manual irrigation pumps should be forsaken in favor of small, cheap, electric pumps, following the lead of Bangladesh. He would empower women by using APIM - Assisted Pump Irrigation Markets, by which 6-8 young women in  a villlage would be trained to function as community Irrigation Service Providers (ISPs). He posited that 3-5 million ISPs could be established in SSA for about $1B - $1.5 B USD, a literal drop in the bucket.

Shah noted that this would require a thorough assessment of SSA's groundwater resources and the development of an agrarian business model.

His presentation evoked a question from Dr. Stephen Foster, former head of hydrogeology at the British Geological Survey and now at the World Bank, who wondered whether the hydrogeology of SSA was adequate for this approach. Interesting that Foster did not mention a BGS program that might help realize Shah's vision. I wondered whether the electricity infrastructure was available to use electric pumps. But Shah's idea is novel and deserves more attention.  Lord knows we haven't succeeded in helping SSA avoid famines.

Shah made an interesting comment: groundwater, not democracy,  has freed India and Pakistan from famines (apologies to Amartya Sen).  

Should be an interesting time in Ethiopia, and I hope some good things spring forth. Africa could use some good things.

"Don't insult the crocodile until you've crossed the river." -- Sudanese proverb